I'm seriously considering buying a Smartcar. I've always loved compact cars, going back to my old 1980 Honda Civic (so old it had round headlights, I used to say in 1992 when I owned it). Compact cars are great on gas, they're fun to drive, usually inexpensive to insure and maintain, have just as many safety features as any other car and...did I mention great on gas?

That's the important part - especially for someone like me who drives here from the GTA each day. Now that gas prices are, let's face it, pretty much out of control, my dream of owning a classic car or a Mustang with a V8 engine are on hold, unless we find a way to get at that abundance of oil that is supposedly on one of the moons of Jupiter. Looking for a solution to high gas prices? Unless you're going to stop driving altogether, you aren't going to find one.

We will never see cheap gas prices ever again - that bears repeating - NEVER AGAIN. All those quaint little anecdotes from my dad about how gas was 25 cents a gallon back in the day enabling him to fill up his big ol' 1964 Chevy Impala for under $5 are ancient history. People are laying blame everywhere for the $1.05-plus-per-litre prices. We're running out of oil, they say. They point to emerging markets like India and China and blame them for taking all that precious black goo. Or maybe the government is too greedy, taking half of what you pay at the pump in taxes.

I have a different theory - good old-fashioned human greed prompted by Hurricane Katrina. A little human inactivity helped the situation nicely as well.

In 2005 the southern Gulf states experienced the worst hurricane in their history - New Orleans still hasn't recovered. Oil companies hiked the gas prices to over $1.25 per liter in some areas, believing there would be a shortage because the emergency oil reserve stored along the gulf coast was being threatened.

Or that's what they told us.

The move resulted in the most expensive gas prices ever - with no one complaining, at least formally. Oil started climbing to above $60-$70 per barrel, which oil companies were reportedly initially nervous about. That is until their fears were allayed when to their astonishment there wasn't a single complaint from consumers.We still drove up to those pumps, handed over our credit and debit cards and filled it to the rim.

What the oil companies learned from all this is that we will keep filling our cars' gas tanks whether the price is $1.20 per litre or $5 per litre. It doesn't matter how much we grumble, the fact is that any organization that sees it can make money while experiencing no backlash is going to do just that. It's human nature - it's greed. It's capitalism and no matter how liberal we think our society is, we're still based upon the US model of supply and demand.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. People complain about being gauged at the pumps but those high prices are probably necessary to keep the supply in place. If gas prices suddenly dropped to 25 cents per litre how much gas would be left at the end of the day?

What worries me most is that we're approaching the Peak. M. King Hubbard was an American geoscientist who at one point worked for Shell Oil. He invented the concept of Peak Oil, or hitting the peak of oil production for a particular area or country, where production would be the highest ever one year, then start declining the next.

In 1956 the United States were the largest oil producers in the world. But that year Mr. Hubbard predicted the US would reach its peak of oil production between 1965 and 1970. No one took him seriously, some even laughed at him, but 1970 saw the first year of decreased oil production for the United States, and they've been declining ever since.

When his prediction came true, Mr. Hubbard then turned his attention to world production numbers. Using the same research methods he concluded that the world would hit its peak production around 2010, then start to decline in the years following.

You know how your gas tank gauge in your car seems to take forever to go down, then once it finally hits the halfway mark it goes to "empty" very quickly? That's the concept of Peak oil. Once we hit that halfway mark it will go very fast, with disastrous consequences. Forget expensive gasoline, how much of our food is grown using oil? Those farm machines have to run on something, and with world population numbers as high as they are, we could see food prices higher than oil costs.

Mr. Hubbard's original estimate for the peak in world oil production was 1995 but it was later amended to the 2010 date. The reason for this was that new technology has enabled us to get at oil reserves previously unattainable 20, like Hibernia in Eastern Canada or the Alberta oil sands.

What can we do about it? It's too simplistic to tell people to stop driving in a society where cities and towns are designed around the automobile. With emerging markets taking more oil than ever before we're stuck with those high prices. All we can really do is curb our habits, maybe drive cars that are better on gas than those SUV's.

Also, lobby government for extra funding for research into alternative fuels. I'm leery of ethanol, or fuel additives made from corn, as I see it jacking up food prices in the future, with more fields being taken away from food production and being used for ethanol crops.

All we can do is live with those prices and hope scientists figure out an alternative. Take more public transit if you can, start riding your bike more often. Maybe do a little carpooling. What else is there?